Most of the holidays that Americans celebrate stand in tension with the prevailing leftist orthodoxy.  That is, with few exceptions—most notably Martin Luther King Day and, perhaps, Labor Day—our holidays, from Easter and Christmas to Thanksgiving, Columbus Day, and Memorial Day, are “politically incorrect.”

Of course, from fear of being labeled an anti-American, the leftist would vehemently deny this.  However, when we consider these holidays in light of his worldview, his act of denial reduces to an exercise in futility.

The leftist, after all, is not a figure that is notable for his fondness of Christianity—at least not inasmuch as it has traditionally found expression.  Christianity is and has been the dominant faith of Western or European (read: white) civilization for the last two millennia.  Since its advent, its superstitious bigotry and claims to exclusivity have forced the world to reckon with racial and other sorts of oppression.  Or so the leftist believes. 

Yet Christmas and Easter are the Christian world’s two premier holidays.  Severally and collectively they serve to remind the planet that one-third of its population—over two billion people—continue to believe in miracles, particularly the miracle that the one and only God of the universe became aMan. 

How can the (clear thinking, consistent) leftist not despise Christmas and Easter?

Thanksgiving also has religious significance, albeit of a more subtle degree.  This is enough to make the leftist distrustful of it.  But more to the point, Thanksgiving is a holiday that forever reminds the leftist of “the genocide” that the European settlers perpetrated against “Native Americans.”

This renders it detestable in his eyes.

Obviously, the primary reason informing his detestation of Thanksgiving is the sole reason accounting for his hatred of Columbus Day.  For however murderous, and murderously “racist,” the American pioneers were, they were a bunch of little rascals compared to the Father of all “racist” oppressors: Christopher Columbus.

Memorial Day is a painful signifier of the nationalist chauvinism, the “jingoism,” for which the leftist has nothing but contempt. Nor does it help matters that the overwhelming majority of veterans who we memorialize on this day were white men whom we credit with changing—and saving—the world. Ditto for Veterans’ Day. 

Even Saints Valentine and Patrick Days must be anathema to the leftist.  For one, they are “saints’” days.  Secondly, the latter is the one day when a white ethnic group gives unadulterated, robust expression to ethnic pride.  It can be—and is—read all too easily by the leftist as an affirmation of a distinctively European tradition.

Mothers’ and Fathers’ Days are celebrations of the family, the one institution that protects the naked individual citizen from the totalizing governmental designs that the leftist wishes to impose upon him.

As for Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays, it should go without saying that the leftist regards them as of a piece with all great, dead white men: they were “racist” bigots whose achievements must be diminished or denied and failings amplified.

Yet the Mother of all Politically InCorrect holidays, the one with which the leftist is most uncomfortable, the one that he disdains more so than any other, is Independence Day. Since it is his twofold conviction that “racism” is both ubiquitous and uniquely awful that lies at the heart of his ideology, it should be expected that this is the one holiday that he should disdain the most.

If the Tea Party movement; the Republican Party; “the right;” the conservative movement and every other predominantly white organization, business, and institution are “racist” simply and solely because they are predominantly white, then those men who gathered to pledge their “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor” to declare their independence from England over 200 years ago were that much more “racist,” for they were all white men.

And it isn’t just that the men who founded this country were white that gives the contemporary leftist night sweats.  That they were white men who were resolved to shed blood—their own and that of those who would deprive them of their liberty—if this was the price to be had for living as free men that accounts as well for the leftist’s angst.

From the spirit of liberty that animated the patriots who forged of these former colonies a new nation springs all manner of evil, as far as the leftist is concerned.  It is the ultimate stumbling block in his quest to “fundamentally transform” the country into the egalitarian utopia of his imaginings.

On this Fourth of July, let us call all of this to mind.  In doing so, let us make ourselves into worthy inheritors of our Fathers’ legacy as we too resolve to fight to the end to live freely.